Basic cable has become an endless amateur hour

Wednesday

Dec 12, 2012 at 2:50 PM

There is terrible, and there is deliberately terrible. And there is a difference. "Nightmare Christmas" (10 p.m. on ID, TV-14) deserves credit for trying to combine predictable holiday programming with a certain audience's insatiable appetite for true crime docudramas. But "Nightmare" attempts lightheartedness without a light touch. The ghoulish Christmas puns (slay bells, ginger-dead, etc.) arrive with all the subtlety of a poisoned fruitcake.

There is terrible, and there is deliberately terrible. And there is a difference. "Nightmare Christmas" (10 p.m. on ID, TV-14) deserves credit for trying to combine predictable holiday programming with a certain audience's insatiable appetite for true crime docudramas. But "Nightmare" attempts lightheartedness without a light touch. The ghoulish Christmas puns (slay bells, ginger-dead, etc.) arrive with all the subtlety of a poisoned fruitcake.

The actors hired for the re-enactments appear to have been directed to ham it up. This is amusing — within limits. "Nightmare" kicks off with a reverse twist on O Henry's "The Gift of the Magi": Newlywed Amber stabs her husband with a kitchen knife because he opened his presents five days too early. After sending him to the emergency room, she begs a doctor there to finish him off.

This is followed by a tale of hapless burglars who rob a church collection box on Christmas Day, and the story of a son who bestows a beautiful and exotic robe on his mother, forgetting that his lovely gift is covered in blood.

All of the narrative wordplay and campy acting in the world can't redeem these vignettes of their sad and sordid nature. That's why this "Nightmare" special, like that bloody gift, can seem so desperate and wrongheaded.

— Along similar lines, "Impractical Jokers" (10 on TRU) returns for a second season. This hidden-camera series follows four guys as they compete to outdo one another by putting perfect strangers in awkward and ridiculous situations. In one segment, they pretend to be office sensitivity consultants and put employees on the spot with a deliberately rude seminar on workplace behavior.

Since the sole purpose of this exercise is for these four jokers to crack one another up, we hear them laughing at their own stunts with unpleasant frequency. Like any small circle of friends, they laugh at the others' jokes even when they're not funny. They seem as indifferent to their audience as they do to their victims. This is deadly.

— Neighborhood moms, overwhelmed by holiday chores, go "On Strike for Christmas" (8on Lifetime Movie Network). This 2010 bauble starring Daphne Zuniga is notable for being a rare TV offering that acknowledges that such things as strikes even exist.